I read about this too. We covered the subject/issue (the difficulty in maintaining a website to support IE's peculiarities) in this thread: What purpose does browser-specific blocking serve?, and it was apparently a real issue for some developers, but this overhead/"tax" seems like quite a novel idea.I think it is incorrect to call it a "tax" though, because only the State can engage in legal extortion - that's a tax.

I've never done web developing, but my notion was that from a web developer's point of view, safari is similar to chrome (i.e. another webkit based browser) and hence respects many more web standards than ie does?

If they can get away with it without tanking sales, this is possibly the endgame of the browser wars. We went from "optimized for Internet Explorer (custom nonstandard crap)" to "charging a service fee to use IE" (as a market driven punishment for that custom nonstandard crap). Conceptually I think that's kinda neat.

Actually, according to this, the company didn't go forward with the tax.

@Renegade: I think this is not exactly a browser war since here the problem is not from an end-user point of view, but from a web-developer point of view. While I've never done web developing, I'm pretty sure that it would annoy the hell out of me to be fixing idiotic bugs for specific browsers only because they decided not to respect the standards!

I've never done web developing, but my notion was that from a web developer's point of view, safari is similar to chrome (i.e. another webkit based browser) and hence respects many more web standards than ie does?

Understood, but last time I checked (which granted was a year or so ago) Safari on Windows supported all of the standards/HTML5 stuff ... While Safari on a Mac only supported about 10% of the HTML5 stuff. Which tells me that Apple is/was too chicken shit to dogfood their own product. Add to that their abysmal security history and Safari=pariah as far as I'm concerned.

As a mac user (not very much by choice, unfortunately), I agree 100%. I'm not stating that from an end-user point of view, safari is any good (it isn't ). But honestly, every time I think of doing some web development on my own I give up when I realize the amount of time I will lose patching stuff because each browser implements stuff in a slightly different way. So, I really can't defend IE7 on this (or any other browser, to be fair, since not even my up-to-date chrome renders acid2 exactly like the reference image).

Could it be possible that they are just a bunch of obnoxious browser bigots?

That's why this story makes news. If they spin it right, low skilled users can't ignore what a browser is anymore, and they'll start to ask questions that don't get asked if "the layout just looks funny and they get an error". The company is "gambling" that the customer has loyalty to Kogan more than the browser.

Actually, this could be the start of a dangerous precedent. Because if Kogan has problems with IE7 then they will have problems (albeit less) with IE8 as well. And that is the highest IE available on XP. So people that cannot upgrade to a more modern OS are effectively blocked. If you cannot afford the upgrade, likely you will not have the money for the extra added tax either.

From what I heard, IE9 is not so bad anymore. I wouldn't know though, as I will not touch IE with a ten foot pole if I can help it!

That it is. Tons of sites have browser compatibility problems, as each developer always develops for their favorite browser and anything else appears second-rate or not at all.

This is the first time that a site has actively penalized users of a specific incompatible browser time. Usually the site just displays a warning message recommending a newer or different brand of browser, or appears mangled in an unsupported browser- like my sites, which lose the webkit-based graphics effects in older IE and Firefox versions.